Attività del Dipartimento

Colloqui di Fisica

Shedding light on the Dark Universe with the ESA Euclid satellite

Nicoletta Mauri

10-10-2017 - 15:00AULA B - Via Della Vasca Navale 84

Euclid is an ESA mission designed to explore the dark side of the Universe and to understand the nature of the dark energy responsible for its accelerated expansion. It will map the geometry of the dark Universe by investigating the distance-redshift relationship and the evolution of cosmic structures over the past 10 billion years. By measuring two cosmological probes simultaneously, the Weak Gravitational Lensing and the Galaxy Clustering (BAOs and Redshift-Space distorsions), Euclid will constrain dark energy, general relativity, dark matter and the initial conditions of the Universe with unprecedented accuracy. Each probe has a dedicated instrument in the payload: an imager in the visible domain (VIS) and an imager-spectrometer (NISP) covering the near infrared.
The Euclid spacecraft will be launched in 2020 and will take data for over six years, observing more than 1 billion of galaxies with photometric redshift and more than 30 millions of spectra of galaxies. The combination of GC and WL over this huge data set will allow to reach a sensitivity at least an order of magnitude better than current limits on cosmological parameters as the ones characterising the dark energy equation of state and the sum of neutrino masses.
In this talk, the Euclid mission, the instruments and the scientific reach will be presented.